How Maps Can Help Fight Racism and Inequality

When Black counter-mapping exposes the how and where of racism, in accessible visual form, that information gains new power to spur social change.

Why you can trust us

By Derek H. Alderman &
Joshua F.J. Inwood

4 MIN READ

Mar 2, 2021

The work of the , a 1960s- and 1970s-era Black political group featured in a and a , helps illustrate how cartography鈥攖he practice of making and using maps鈥攃an illuminate injustice.

As these films show, the Black Panthers focused on African American empowerment and , running diverse programming that ranged from to armed self-defense.

Cartography is a less-documented aspect of the Panthers鈥� activism, but the group used maps to .

In 1971, the Panthers collected 15,000 signatures on a petition to create new 鈥攄istricts that would be governed by local citizen commissions and require officers to live in the neighborhoods they served. The proposal made it onto the ballot but was defeated.

In a similar effort to make law enforcement more responsive to communities of color, the Panthers in the late 1960s also created a map proposing to divide up within San Francisco, largely along racial lines.

The Black Panthers are just one chapter in a long history of 鈥渃ounter-mapping鈥� by African Americans, which our explores. refers to how groups normally excluded from political decision-making deploy maps and other geographic data to communicate complex information about inequality in an easy-to-understand visual format.

The Black Panthers鈥� proposed police districts for San Francisco, created in 1966 or 1967. Image from , .

The Power of Maps

Maps are location guides. Mapmakers choose what to include and exclude, and how to display information to users.

These decisions can have far-reaching consequences. When the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s set out to map the risk associated for banks loaning money to individuals for homes in different neighborhoods, for example, they rated minority neighborhoods as high risk and color-coded them as red.

The result, known as 鈥�,鈥� contributed to housing discrimination for three decades, until federal law banned such maps in 1968. Redlining鈥檚 legacy is still evident in many American cities鈥� .

Colonial explorers charting their journeys and city planners and developers pursuing urban renewal, too, have used cartography to represent the world in ways that further their own priorities. Often, the resulting maps exclude, misrepresent, or . Academics and government officials do this, too.

Counter-maps produce an alternative public understanding of the facts by highlighting the experiences of oppressed people.

Black people aren鈥檛 the only marginalized group to do this. , , have also redrawn maps to account for their existence and rights.

But Black Americans were among the earliest purveyors of counter-mapping, deploying this alternative cartography to serve a variety of needs a century ago.

An early 20th century NAACP map showing lynchings between 1909 and 1918. The maps were sent to politicians and newspapers to spur legislation protecting Black Americans. .

Black Counter-Mapping

Mapping is part of the .

Over the centuries, African Americans developed 鈥溾€� aids, including a , to help them navigate a racially hostile landscape and created visual works that affirmed the value of .

The Black sociologist and civil rights leader produced maps for the 1900 Paris Exposition to inform international society about the gains African Americans had made in income, education, and land ownership since slavery and in face of continuing racism.

Similarly, in 1946, Friendship Press cartographer and illustrator Louise Jefferson published a celebrating the contributions of African Americans鈥攆rom famous writers and athletes to unnamed Black workers鈥攊n building the United States.

In the early 20th century, anti-lynching crusaders at the NAACP and Tuskegee Institute stirred public outcry by producing that informed showing the location and frequency of African Americans murdered by White lynch mobs.

One map, published in 1922 in the NAACP鈥檚 magazine , placed dots on a standard map to document 3,456 lynchings over 32 years. The Southeast had the largest concentration. But the 鈥渂lots of shame,鈥� as mapmaker Madeline Allison called them, spanned the country from east to west and well into the north.

These visualizations, along with the underlying data, to allied organizations such as the citizen-led , to newspapers nationwide and to elected officials of all parties and regions. The activists hoped to spur Congress to pass federal anti-lynching legislation鈥攕omething that remains to this day .

Much anti-lynching cartography was inspired by the famed activist and reporter , who in the early 1880s made some of the first tabulations of the prevalence and geographic distribution of racial terror. Her work refuted prevailing White claims that lynched Black men had sexually assaulted White women.

Modern Maps

The precariousness of Black life鈥攁nd the exclusion of Black stories from American history鈥攔emains an unresolved issue today.

Working alone and with White allies, Black activists and scholars continue using cartography to tell a fuller , to and to .

Today, the maps they create are often digital.

For example, the Equal Justice Initiative, the Alabama-based legal defense group run by Bryan Stevenson, has produced a modern map of . It鈥檚 an interactive update of the anti-lynching cartography made 100 years ago鈥攁lthough a full reconstruction of lynching terror remains impossible because of incomplete data and the veil of silence that persists around these murders.

The Equal Justice Initiative鈥檚 map tells stories of people who were lynched. Screenshot from.

Another modern mapping project, called Mapping Police Violence, was launched by after Michael Brown鈥檚 murder in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. police use of force using a time-series animated map. Deaths and injuries flash across the screen and accumulate on the map of the United States, visually communicating the national scale and urgency of this problem.

Counter-mapping operates on the theory that communities and governments cannot fix problems that they do not understand. When Black counter-mapping exposes the how and where of racism, in accessible visual form, that information gains new power to spur social change.

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission.

Derek H. Alderman is a professor of geography and Betty Lynn Hendrickson Professor of Social Science at the University of Tennessee. Dr. Alderman is perhaps best known for examining the politics of naming U.S. streets after Martin Luther King, Jr., and he frequently uses this scholarship to engage and inform the news media, government officials, community activists and organizations, and the broader public. He is the author of more than 150 articles, book chapters, and other essays along with the award-winning book (with Owen Dwyer), Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory.

Joshua F.J. Inwood is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University鈥檚 geography department, and a research associate in Penn State鈥檚 Rock Ethics Institute. Most recently he has worked on the movement to address human wrongs through truth and reconciliation commissions, specifically the burgeoning truth movement within the United States. Josh contributes to literature on urban spaces, political geographies, justice and historical and cultural geographies, as well as others.